So you may have gathered that I’ve been on something of a tear. Pardon my pun. I started ripping up the floor in the downstairs hallway floor a week ago. I think the best thing about old floors is how they connect and change direction from room to room, so doing the hallway sort of carried me right into the dining room, which then drove me upstairs into that hallway, and then into the guest bedroom…. Turns out that ripping up floors is both therapeutic, and highly addictive. I thought it might give a kick to do this post as a mega before and after… see below.

Here’s the entry hall as we found it, when we first moved in.

And here it is, sans newer floor and hideous wallpaper.

And plus radiator!

Here’s the dining room as we found it.

Here’s it is, a couple months later. This one’s a decent before-floor shot.

Here’s the dining room this morning..

There they are! Nice wide-board pine floors. We’re trying to figure out how we can clean and seal them without changing that nice dirty grey color..

This is a pretty fantastic photo of the stairs when we moved in.

Here are the stairs this morn. It makes me shudder to imagine how much money the prior owners spent putting in all the terrible flooring and wallpaper. They’re probably rolling over in their graves right now, as we gleefully rip it all out..

Top o’ the stairs! My favorite part. Boy, do I love those perpendicular lines..

Here’s the upstairs hallway. Pisciotta style.

Here it is Moyer-Dzierlenga style.

Antes..

Despues! I have to give some major cred to my friend Rachel on this one, cause she did this section. I’m really bummed I don’t have a picture of the injury she sustained while doing it. She gave one board such a mighty yank that it flipped up and hit her in the face. She started bleeding, so I convinced her to put a band-aid on it. She looked pretty amazing. Rachel’s face is a small price to pay for such a nice hallway..

The upstairs hallway sort of looks like a wild-west saloon now. You might be able to guess how I feel about that..

Here’s an interlude.

Frosty windows.

Here’s the guest bedroom as we found it.

And here it is today!

Ok, so maybe that’s not the biggest improvement in everyone’s eyes, but look at that wacky cut-out section in the floor! We are thinking when the Pisciottas bought the place, they knew they were going to put in a new floor, so they tore into this old one to sister a couple of sagging summer beams. (We think the floor started to sag when the chimney fell.)

You can see some handiwork goin on under there. And, if you look closely, you can see some real snazzy slippers, too.

There are these patches of decrepit old floral matting, which I really like. It seems like whoever was living here before the Pisciottas went through a phase when they weren’t able to do much around the house, so they just put down funny little mats to cover holes and such.

Here’ s Rachel steaming off some wallpaper in the guest room. You may notice that she’s still smiling. That’s because this is only hour one, out of 9 or 10.. This is also pre- band-aid..

And, to fully bring you up to speed, Sam spent a large part of a very cold yesterday insulating our chimney liner. He then convinced me (against my better judgement,) to get up on the roof with him and to help try’n rangle this thing down our chimney. Turns out, it doesn’t fit. (Yet.) To be continued. Unfortunately, probably later today..